He paced around. Sometimes he swayed and swooned. sometimes he closed his eyes and stood in the middle of the room, flexing the muscles in his neck, feinting first one way and then another. He imagined Vincent Clay in the photograph, being looked at by Hannah Weekes. He imagined him shedding his green halo and loosening himself off, moving out of the frame. He felt the cold focus of the eyes that got animated when he wanted something. He sensed the dextrous manipulations of the hidden hands, the balance of the feet. Sometimes he heard him, tuned his ear in to the way he said things: I’m new to the neighbourhood. I can have a beer with my buddies, right? What did I tell you about the system? Carpe diem, my man. Seize the goddamned day.
It was like that for three days. Some sleep, but not much. In room nine on the ground floor of the Prairie View with the view of the lot and not the prairie or the skies above it. He tried to figure it, to gather it all in; the history, the land, the town and the gold. He gathered the greed and the resentment and what it was he needed to do. And he gathered Vincent and his hairy-eared accomplice, and how he might drag them in and snare them, like bugs in a jar.
He could’ve just held on to the land. He could’ve held onto it and made the whole thing about him and Vincent Clay alone. It would’ve been easier man to man, to contact Vincent and tell him straight that the vast majority of the gold deposits were buried under the Cassidy land and all he needed to do was to buy it up and dig. But that was too simple. John liked the twistier course. He liked the convolutions and complexities, the flax of the woven narratives, the risk of failure, even. He liked how all that guile and diligence, those manipulations and moves, made the suffering for the other so much greater. It was Dwayne all over again. Not the single blow, not the too brief satisfaction that offered nothing after the punch had gone. And, as for the town, and Ted Mallender, and all the other deserving flotsam and jetsam, well, how could they be absolved.
The rumour of the potential sale spread quickly. For one thing, once Lily Mallender knew, once Ted had told her and looked her up and down for loosened hair and straggled clothes, then the following morning Sylvie Buckle, the beautician, knew and once Sylvie knew, it was open season. The news ran between those conical dryers like currents. Women of all ages raised thin, crescent brows and curled soon-to-be hairless lips. The conversations zip-wired around the hair-sprayed room and those women, sitting in the midst of beautification, with magazines or without, wondered again, as they always did, as they could not help but do, what the young Cassidy man might be like.
And for another, the two mousy ledger-men in the Land Management Agency had so little else to speak of in their lives that wasn’t to do with columns and figures that the opportunity, for once, to be the bearers of news that, while technically confidential, would no doubt slip out anyway, was one definitely to be taken. And so speak out they did, to their wives, children and neighbours. Plus, they’d seen the Cassidy man up close. They’d been in the same room as him, breathed in the same air.
But while those nuggets were bolstering the kudos of the ledger-men, for others it was less so. Poor Doug Sketchings, for instance, told his shiny-skinned wife, Viola, with enough animation to suggest the news might affect them personally, and then watched as the words dimmed and disappeared into the deadpan of her eyes before she put on her moccasins and tucked into the tub of peppermint ice-cream she was holding.
And if Jake Massey had been around the streets and stores of Mission on that late summer morning, he’d’ve no doubt been doling out information like candy sticks to anyone with or without a sweet tooth. Or, if he’d been at the timber mill like he should’ve, he’d’ve been yelling it above the buzz-saws for all to hear, especially those guys from Harry’s. But he wasn’t. Because the morning the town was alive with the news of the sale, Jake was waking up on the floor of the Cassidy homestead surrounded by shoeboxes and a dozen empty bottles of Jack Cassidy’s beer and with a headache like a faultline, cleavered and seeped in.
He sat up. To his side the cellar door was lifted up, shirt boxes had the lids off. There was a blanket smelling vaguely of muscle-rub over his legs and feet. The window he’d prised open to get in was open still. He adjusted himself. Sunlight came in and made patterns on the kitchen floor. There was an empty pack of cigarettes by his feet, stubbed ends and ash on the linoleum tiles. He frowned at the lids of the shirt boxes, saw the skewered papers where he’d rifled and sifted. When he stood, he allowed the blanket to fall and nudged at the boxes with his feet. He got the same maps, the pages of local history both loose and bound, the hardback covers of encyclopaedias. He got newspaper articles, some of which he started to read until he ran out of patience. He got the leaflets again: a menu for Sizzlin’ Steve’s, the rates at the Smithson loan company, the cost of tool hire at Archer’s chandlery. And he got the photographs, the monochrome and sepia prints he shifted out with the soles of his shoes, pushing them over to the sunlight and looking down at the lawns of the Mallender estate, at the facades of the Colonial house and at the bearded Cassidy man whose land it was, kneeling on the half-timbered roof of the homestead-to-be.
He imagined Delilah Morris again. He imagined her out on the veranda with John, the moonlight on the dress, the give of her stomach on the balustrade. And John looking towards her, towards the cradle at the base of her spine and the slow curve of the hips. And him then pushing the bolt of the door into the hole, keeping her breathy down in the dark.
The sound of the car broke him away. He could hear it making its way along the path towards the house. He sneaked into the bedroom and flicked the drapes to take a look, saw the two-tone Chevy stop where the path got too narrow to drive any further. Inside was a man in his thirties and a woman of similar age. They talked for a while, mostly the man, using his hands, and then he got out. Jake watched him stand, look up towards the homestead, and then start to walk. He was broad, barrel-chested, a good six feet in his work boots, and the closer he got, Jake picked out the thin, down-turned grimness of the mouth, the eyes that narrowed and the two cut-knuckled hands.
He could hear the footsteps on the rubbled earth and then on the wood of the veranda. He watched him stand in the doorway, swivel his bull neck slowly from one side to the other. He saw how the torso leant forward and the marine-cut head extended out like a hawksbill turtle and spoke with a smoker’s rasp.
“Mr Cassidy? John Cassidy?”
Jake tried to stay still. But this was Jake. This was a lifetime of twitchiness and so, as he shuffled, his foot struck a tin of peaches in syrup and sent it rolling to an audible clunk against the bedroom door.
“Ok, so you don’t want to come out, that’s fine. I can say my piece from here.”
Jake looked down at the shirt box open to watches and chains and hatpins.
“Now, I’m sorry for your loss, Mr Cassidy, and I guess you have all kinds to deal with selling up the land, but you owe my sister-in-law money. We can do this two ways. You can pay Sophie what she’s owed and the whole thing is done with. Or, you can make a dispute of it. That’s up to you. But ask anyone who knows Lee Shaw and they’ll tell you to go for the first option.”
Jake swallowed, wanted the long drag of a cigarette.
“I’ve got an amount written down on a piece of paper here, and I’m going to push it under the door. You got a week, Mr Cassidy. Then I’ll be back. And if I were you, I’d have the money ready.”
He watched the paper appear, saw the man turn and walk away. He heard him go back across the path and then he scuttled over to the drapes again to see him climb into the Chevy and drive away without once speaking to the woman beside him. He watched the car all the way back to the road, the other side of which, across immaculate, undulating lawns, along the Italianate colonnade and through the double, arched doors of eggshell blue to the elbow of the staircase, knelt Lily Mallender, with perky lashes and manicured hands spread on the wall in front of her, gulping the Venezuelan semen of Jorge, the hirsute gardener.
When John got back from the
Serpentine hotel, he noticed nothing of the break-in. The cellar door was closed, the shoe- and shirt boxes were put back, if not in identical places then close enough, and the empty beer bottles had been bagged and disposed of, likewise the cigarette butts. The piece of paper on the linoleum floor he couldn’t figure, nor the figures on it, nor the cakes of dried earth on the veranda steps, or the film of a single, oily print on the jamb of the door.
The first couple of days he spent catching up on sleep. He stayed with the black coffee and the tinned fruit, supplemented by nuts and grain, but cut out the bottle of his father’s beer, which was why he didn’t notice the missing ones. And he exercised. He cranked up the frequency of the sit-ups and squat-thrusts, used kilogram tins of pineapples and pickled hams as weights and, every morning, took those walks out across the rough terrain in his winter boots, the ears pricked, the snout back sniffing. And, with every stride, over ridges, hummocks and dips, past vines of sot-weed and clusters of prickly pear, he composed the letter to Vincent Clay.
On the fifth day he was back, he walked the rough terrain of the Cassidy land for the last time as its owner, and when he got back, he sat down at the kitchen table where his father had sat in his plaid shirt and wrote it.
Dear Mr. Clay, it said: It has been brought to my attention by a reliable source that you are a man of considerable enterprise and ambition. It is with this in mind that I offer you the following proposition: To the north-west of the country, some two hundred miles inland and four hundred and fifty to the border, lies the small town of Mission. It is a remote community between the western edge of the prairie lands and the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Given that its chief source of employment is the timber mill, which is currently suffering under the economic strain, the town is leaning towards a degree of instability, a fact that, I’m sure you’ll recognise, makes it all the riper for opportunity.
What you will also discover, should you consult your history books, is that towards the end of the penultimate century the town was the subject of intense, but largely unproductive gold-mining and was, as one local historian put it, ‘chaotic with purblind greed’. More interestingly, though, that same historian also suggested in a lesser-known volume that the main reason for the lack of success was that ‘the prospectors, arriving in a raggedy fashion mainly from the south and the east, had done little to no research as to the accurate location of the gold’ and approached its potential discovery with ‘little skill and logic and a surfeit of randomness and brawn’. The history of the town suggests that during the prospectors’ stay, the very fabric of the town underwent drastic and unwelcome changes and to prevent further upheavals to the community any mention of the gold or its whereabouts was discouraged. However, according to previously unseen and unpublished documentation, it is estimated with some confidence that a sizeable amount of the material awaits excavation still. Naturally, this is by no means common knowledge and access to the areas will only be possible via private investment, but for a reasonable fee, I am offering you the opportunity for the kind of financial dividends you rarely chance upon.
For myself, a man of equal enterprise, it is sufficient to say that, sadly, I am currently not in a position to purchase the land myself but to guarantee the success of my venture I have sent this letter to a number of other companies and individuals. Each letter is the same and no-one contains any more information than the other. Personally, I have no interest in who makes the offer, so long as the offer is made.
Upon the payment of the initial fee, a detailed map will be sent indicating the lie of the enriched lands and who currently owns them. Should you not be in receipt of this map, take it that you have been either unsuccessful, too late or too provident in your decision-making. If this is the case, your cheque will be immediately returned. On this you have my word as a gentleman, albeit, of necessity, an anonymous one. If you are successful, then I wish you every prosperity and as an act of gratitude, I would consider twenty per cent of the overall profit to be sufficient reward.
Yours
Then, just over a week after he’d got back from the Prairie View, after every change had been made and the endless possibilities and permutations had been exhausted, he sent it.
The following day, a late August afternoon with patchy whipped clouds and a mild westerly, he went to the Land Management Agency to see Ted Mallender. Doug noticed him first, then the two ledger-men, who put their pens down simultaneously and lifted their heads to watch the subject of their confidential whisperings walk in. Ted was the last to know. Marooned in the smaller office those last few days he was curdling still in Jake’s delivered bulletin that, yes, he’d seen the jalopy on the driveway, but no, when he’d peeked in through the windows, there was no sign of Jorge, and no sign either of Lily.
He broke away from his drift to stand, adjusted his tie, practised a brief, business-like smile, and unclenched his fists.
“Come in, John,” he said, “take a seat.”
John put the deeds down on the table, without sitting. “The land,” he said.
“The rough land?”
“The thousand square yards of land. It’s yours if you want it.”
Ted narrowed his eyes slightly, and smiled. “OK, let’s do this,” he said, “let’s move this thing along. I see no point in deliberation.”
And, via an officious sequence of actions including the opening and closing of cabinet drawers, the flash and whirr of the photo-copying machine and a flurry of stamping, signing and sealing, that’s what they did. At the end, with not a word having passed between them, there was a handshake, Ted’s firm and forthright, John’s intentionally limp.
The two men stood a moment. Ted saw the winter boots, the signed deeds on the table. He had some of his land.
“You don’t have any debts, Mr Cassidy? I’m just asking.”
John’s brow twitched.
“Nothing your father owes? No payments outstanding? No four-figure sums? And is there any good reason to know how much the hire of an industrial sander is? From Archer’s chandlery? Or the payback rates at Smithson’s? What kind of steak man are you, Mr Cassidy?”
John looked directly at Ted for as long as it would take to skin a small rabbit, and then turned on his heels and walked away. He walked through the doorway of the Land Management Agency, down three flights of stairs with walnut angels on the rails and out into the afternoon sunlight.
“You know, I’m surprised,” Doug said, “I mean, his family has that land for over a century, and he’s here a few months and he’s selling it.” He moved over to the board and moved four red pins around the rough terrain of what once was the Cassidy land.
Ted wiped his hands on the table’s sheen and stood in the doorway to the main office. “He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, that’s why. He’s an amateur. He’s a novice. I paid half what it’s worth. He knows nothing. His ancestor stole the land. And now we’re stealing it back. There are animals in the forest smarter than he is.”
When John got back to the homestead there was a scrawled note pinned to the door, which said: I gave you a week. You cross me at your peril. He looked at it and tried to figure what it meant. Then he went inside and brought out the piece of paper he’d found on the linoleum floor a week earlier. It was the same handwriting, the same thick, slanted strokes from the same notebook. Plus, when he looked, there was the tack of the same oily handprint on the frame of the door.
The first thing he figured was this, that the four-digit number on the sheet corresponded to the four-digit sum suggested by Ted Mallender, and that same four-digit number corresponded to a debt allegedly owed by himself or his father. Second, that the precise nature of Ted’s questions, alongside all the other shit about industrial sanders, payback rates and how he liked his steak meant only one thing, that someone had been in the homestead and gone through his stuff. And who was it knew he was away for a few days, who was it knew he was in Serpentine, and who was it wanted more information than a small-town gossip? Te
d Mallender. And who would Ted Mallender ask to go and get him that information like a dopey lapdog? Jake Massey.
He checked the shoe and shirt boxes. Some of the sheets had definitely been moved and there, skewed on top of one of them were the leaflets for Archer’s chandlery, for Smithson’s loans, and for Sizzlin’ Steve’s. He went down into the cellar and noticed the missing bottles of his father’s beer. Back in the kitchen, on his hands and knees he found specks of cigarette ash on the bristles of the broom and, in rummaging to the bottom of the trashcan, he came across an empty pack of Marlboros. He also figured, as he stood on the veranda and looked out over Coronation Point bathed in soft sunlight, that whoever had written the note and pushed the four-digit figure through the door had seen Jake, the dopey lapdog, and figured it was him.
It was enough for him to know that it was Jake. It was enough to know that he’d sliced open his father’s armchair without a word of apology, that he’d broken into his home, stolen the beer, rifled through his possessions and fed whatever information he felt necessary back to his master. And it was enough because, standing in the late summer air with hints of fabric softener drifting over from the Anderson clothes-line, he didn’t need to go and pay him a visit and hold his father’s shotgun to his head. He had his own plans for Jake Massey.
Four days later, he got Vincent Clay’s reply, to which he replied, and four days after that he watched as a two-tone Chevy turned off the main road and made its way along the path to the homestead. It was mid-afternoon, temperate, a few degrees cooler than the day before.
Mission Page 10